“They like to tear things into very small pieces,” Dionysus said. “It makes a terrible mess, but what can I do? I can’t say no to the dear things.”
Capone had looked scared before, but now he looked downright terrified. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he pissed himself right there and then, and even though part of me felt a measure of satisfaction at seeing him humbled, another part of me – a bigger part – thought that no man deserved this.
“Does he really have to –”
Dionysus shot me a look, and I saw something in his eyes, a fierce coldness that wasn’t even remotely human, and I shut my goddamned trap.
Capone looked at me then, his eyes pleading with me to do something, anything, but then his ego kicked into gear, and he realized he was asking his most hated enemy for help. The fear left his face and was replaced by an arrogant sneer.
“Fine. Sure. Why the hell not? I ain’t got anything to be afraid of, right?”
Dionysus didn’t say anything, but the maenads withdrew their crimson-clawed hands, and Capone leaned forward, took hold of the glass, and raised it to his lips. He took only the merest sip, and then he put the glass back down on the table. He sat still for a several moments, and I watched beads of sweat form on his forehead. Then, slowly, he smiled.
“See? Nothin’ to it. I knew –” He broke off then, his eyes widening. At first I thought he was staring at me, but then I realized he was staring past me. Not at my men, but at something that wasn’t there. Or maybe it was there, and the rest of us just couldn’t see it.
“Clark?” Capone said. “Is that you? It can’t be. You got yours on Valentine’s Day!” He broke off, and his lower lip started to tremble. “Stop looking at me like that.”
He tried to turn away, but one of the maenads grabbed hold of his chin and forced him to keep looking.
Clark had to be James Clark, who Capone killed in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Was the man’s spirit really there, staring at the bastard who’d gunned him down? Or was Capone seeing a ghost conjured by whatever atrophied remnant of human conscience he possessed? In the end, I suppose it didn’t matter.
Capone tore free from the maenad’s grip and rose from his chair. He tried to play it cool, but he got up a little too fast and lines of sweat ran down his face. He cleared his throat too loudly and adjusted his tie.
“That hootch didn’t do nothing to me.” He looked at Dionysus and his upper lip curled into a sneer. “Tasted like shit, too.”
Dionysus merely smiled.
Capone turned to me then and fixed me with a steely glare.
“See you around, Treasury Man.”
“Yes, you will.”
I held his gaze for a long moment, and then he turned and started toward the exit, moving at a quick pace, as if he really wanted to run but didn’t want anyone to know it. He looked back over his shoulder once. Not at me or Dionysus, though. He quickly turned back. The cyclops opened the door for him, and he rushed through without giving the one-eyed monster so much as a glance. It was over. Almost.
I looked at Dionysus.
“I don’t see any reason to shut this place down. Not that I could,” I quickly added. “Besides, I think it’s a little outside my jurisdiction.”
Dionysus looked at me for several moments, his gaze unreadable. But in the end, he smiled. “Go in peace, Eliot. You and your men.”
I nodded then stood. Paul, Lyle, Bill, and the rest of the guys looked relieved, and I didn’t blame them in the slightest. We all turned then and started toward the exit. The Cyclops was still holding the door, and he grinned as we filed past. He gave me a fast one-eyed blink that I think was his version of wink, and I winked back. A thought occurred to me then, and just before I stepped back into what we mere mortals think of as the real world, I turned and called out to Dionysus.
“You know, I think Capone left without paying his tab.”
Dionsyus’ face was as impassive as that of a cold marble statue.
“Oh, we’ll settle up later.”
Capone was found guilty of tax evasion shortly after that. He spent years in solitary confinement, drowning in his own madness. From what I hear, he died still begging ol’ Jimmy Clark for forgiveness.
And Dionysus? On the day the Volstead Act was repealed, ol’ purple peepers sent me a package, an ivy-covered decanter of Ambrosia. Somewhere, maybe in a bar in some five-star resort hotel or maybe in a run-down roach-infested dive, I imagine he’s sitting at a table, full glass in hand, laughing.
* * *
Shirley Jackson Award finalist Tim Waggoner has published over thirty novels and three short story collections of dark fiction. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill Universitys MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. You can find him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.
Michael West is the bestselling author of Cinema of Shadows, The Wide Game, Spook House, Skull Full of Kisses, and the critically-acclaimed Legacy of the Gods series. He lives and works in the Indianapolis area with his wife, their two children, their turtle, Gamera, and their dog, King Seesar. Faithful readers can find more information about him and his work at www.bymichaelwest.com.
Best Served Cold
Seanan McGuire
The temperature dropped six degrees when she walked into the office, going from balmy evening to the first breath of winter in the time it took for one silk-wrapped leg to step across my threshold. The rest of her followed, as implacable as frost slithering across a windowpane, and just as deadly. I had raised my head when the temperature fell, and I followed the span of her leg up to her velvet mini-dress—as red as blood—and the silken waterfall of her hair—as black as coal. There was color in her cheeks, but it looked like it had been painted on. Expensive and artificial is still fake, and if that woman had any melanin in her, I’d eat my secretary.
Her lips were as bloody red as the apple I was sure she’d never eaten. I raised an eyebrow. “Your Majesty.”
“I see I’ve come to the right place.” There was a hint of a Maritime lilt in her voice, something that spoke of the high, wild country where the frost never quite melted away. Newfoundland, most likely, blurred and obscured by some very expensive diction instructors, but never quite eliminated. Roots are like that. You can bury them, but they’ll always betray you. “Detective Silva, I presume?”
“My name’s on the door,” I said, still not rising from my desk. She hadn’t come any farther than the doorway, maybe because she liked the way it framed her figure—as if she needed any help; that was a woman who could have stood in the street in a nun’s habit and still had people convinced that they’d just seen the second coming of Helen of Troy—but maybe because she couldn’t. Not without my permission. It was always hard to say with the liminals. “Can we just confirm that I’m talking to the current Winter Queen? I don’t want to misspeak and bring about a freeze.”
Her bloody lips curved upward in a smile. “Confirmed,” she said. “My name is Clodagh Holly, and I am the Queen of the Winter. I was referred to you by an acquaintance who assured me that you worked quickly, affordably, and best of all, discreetly. Discretion is of the deepest importance to me, for reasons that I’m sure you can understand.”
“Isn’t ‘Holly’ the name you folks traditionally take after coronation?” I leaned back in my chair, giving her my best unimpressed look. I knew full well that the common surnames of Kings and Queens of the big two were “Holly” and “Oak,” because those liminal assholes never met a myth they didn’t feel like making themselves a part of. Spring princes tended to go for “Green,” and autumn princesses went for “Wicker.” It was all very predictable. “Who are you really?”
The Queen drew herself up a little straighter, abandoning her efforts to look attractive in favor of looking much more honestly annoyed. “I am really Queen Clodagh Holly, Lady of the Snows, Keeper of the Frost, and you would do well to remember that you are not in control here.”
“Right.” I picked u
p a nail file my secretary had left on my desk the last time she snuck into the office to use my computer, and began calmly filing the side of my thumbnail. The Queen gaped at me. I nodded toward her. “Door’s behind you. It’s still open, so you shouldn’t have any trouble showing yourself out. I know doorknobs are beneath you, Your Majesty. I wouldn’t dream of forcing you to use one.”
The temperature in the room dropped another five degrees as the Queen’s eyes went wide and round with shock. It was a good expression on her. For the first time since she’d sidled into my office like a winter wonderland in spike heels, she looked like a real person. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said the door’s behind you. Shouldn’t be too hard to understand, even for an embodied personification of a weather pattern, like yourself.” I kept filing my nails. “See, you think I’m not in control here, and that’s all fine, but I think you’re the one who needs to remember a few things. Like the part where the only power you have over me is what I give you—and lady, right now, you’re not encouraging me to give you the time of day.”
Her mouth snapped shut. She looked like she was thinking of saying something, and then, surprise surprise, looked like she thought better of it. She took a step forward, wobbling a little on her impractical shoes, and bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have little interaction outside the Court during my own season. Sometimes I…forget…that not everyone swears their fealty to us.”
I glanced to the small office window. Snow sleeted down outside, no doubt intensified by the nearness of its progenitor. When I looked back to Clodagh she was sagging in place, her alabaster shoulders slumped under their burden of red velvet. “What do you do when it’s not winter?” I asked. “Hang out with the proles down on the street corner?”
She frowned slowly, looking confused. “I die,” she said.
Ah. “Right,” I said. “So what brings you by my little slice of the straight and narrow? I’m not on the market, if you were hoping to recruit me. No desire on this lady’s part to go liminal.”
“But you already are,” said Clodagh, confusion deepening until it seemed like a chasm that stretched between the lady’s lips and mine. She shook it off, some of her previous slink returning to her posture as she said, “I’m not here to recruit you. I have snoops and sneakers a’plenty in my Court, and besides, such active measures are beneath me. I’m here to hire you.”
I raised an eyebrow, looking her slowly up and down—from the toes of her black leather heels to the crown of her black haired head—before I asked, “Hire me for what?”
“It’s a delicate matter. I would prefer that it be handled outside my Court.”
“Hire me for what?” I repeated.
“I’ve heard good things about your work. I understand that you always find what you’re sent to look for, and that you’ve never spilled a client’s secrets.”
I was starting to get annoyed. She might be pretty enough to put the Northern Lights to shame, and she might be genuine liminal royalty, but she was also a damn pain in my tail. “Lady, you’re going to tell me what you want to hire me for right now, or you’re going to back your ass up and get out of my office.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you always speak to your prospective clients so rudely?”
“Just the royal ones. I have a problem with authority.” Both true and false, although I didn’t feel like discussing my past with one of the liminals: they always saw blessings as curses and curses as blessings, thanks to their admittedly sideways relationship with the human race. I guess people who walk the earth as living snowstorms don’t really need to think about the importance of playing nicely with the other children.
“So I’ve heard.” She took a deep breath, apparently steadying herself, and said, “It’s my fiancé. He’s missing.”
I frowned. “You’re a Holly,” I said. “You should be married to the Summer King.”
“I wasn’t always a Holly,” she said, reluctantly. “Before the winter chose me, I was a woman. I had a life. I had a fiancé. He came with me, to the Court. Even if we couldn’t be together…like that…anymore, I was allowed to keep him with me, to remind me that all things thaw, in time. He still loves me. He says so every day.”
“But he’ll freeze to death if he touches you,” I said, standing. “Not really the basis for a healthy relationship.”
“Phillip loves me,” Clodagh repeated stubbornly. “He wouldn’t have left voluntarily.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re a Queen. That makes my price five hundred a day, plus expenses, first three days to be paid up front. And when I bring him in, dead or alive, I get a wish. Sound fair?”
“Dead?” The temperature dropped another five degrees. If this kept up, the pipes were going to freeze. “What do you mean, dead?”
“If you’re telling me he didn’t leave voluntarily, then he may have left against his will. I have to cover my bases.” I looked at her calmly. “Did anything else disappear with this Phillip of yours?”
She sniffled, producing a snowy handkerchief from somewhere and using the corner to dab at her bone-dry eyes. “Nothing important. Just Phillip, and some of my jewels.”
Oh, no. “Which jewels?”
“Some earrings, a bracelet, and the Star of Borealis.”
Oh, hell no. “Lady,” I said, “my fee just doubled.”
Clodagh smiled, all traces of false sorrow dropping away. “I somehow thought you’d say that.”
* * *
I didn’t know which came first, the Snow Queen or the storm, but either way, I stepped out of my downtown office and into the sort of urban blizzard that makes a girl think about closing up shop and moving to Maui. The only liminals there are tied to volcanoes and tides and the occasional tsunami, and while all those things can be inconvenient, none of them come with a side order of freezing your nose hairs into tiny icicles. I scowled at the sky and pulled up my hood, drawing it tight to protect my ears.
“You wanna cut this out?” I demanded.
If the Snow Queen heard me, she did not in fact want to cut it out. The wind howled louder as I kicked my way through the snow to my car, cozied up to the curb like a lover who never wanted to get out of bed again. Tough titty, as the eponymous cat once said. I slid into the frigid cab and cranked the engine until it howled for mercy, then pulled out and began trundling down the street, cornering with caution. This was liminal weather, but some danies were likely to be out in it as well. If there’s one thing you can’t fault the danie population for, it’s a lack of stubborn. Maybe they’re secretly liminals after all, and that’s their affiliation to the world: they embody the stubbornness of a planet dumb enough to litter itself with all us assholes.
Liminal or danie, most people were smart enough to stay off the streets of Vancouver during a raging snowstorm. Inch by inch, I made my way from the office to the best place I knew for starting a trace on stolen jewelry: Jack’s on the East Side. The beer was always cheap, the wine was always crappy, and if you had something you needed to offload in a hurry, Jack was always and forever your man.
The parking lot was completely free of snow, thanks to a wreath of golden grain hanging off the side of the building. Didn’t make it any less cold when I jammed my car into one of the few available parking spaces and got out, huffing and puffing in the frigid air. Jack’s was hopping, probably in part because of that same snow-free parking lot: the idea of being able to get a drink without wadding through ankle-deep slush was undoubtedly a popular one.
I tossed the wreath a quick salute as I walked under it. There was no telling which of the various harvest kings or summer queens had blessed the thing, and when I can’t be safe, I prefer not to be sorry.
The main room at Jack’s was suspiciously empty, considering the state of the parking lot. Regulars were scattered around the tables and stools; Cindy was on the stage, making love to the microphone, while her silent partner in crime sat at the piano, running her fingers across the ivories like the fog rolling i
n across the harbor. Jack’s been refusing to get a juke for as long as I’ve known him. Says live music gives the place an air of class. I don’t think anything could give his joint an air of class, except for maybe a wrecking ball, but Cindy and her accompanist seemed happy whenever I saw them, so maybe he was just trying to do a favor for a friend. He could be a decent man when he wanted to be. It was just a pity that the urge struck him with such surpassing rarity.
Jack himself was behind the bar, drying glasses and watching the door with a studiously casual air. I stomped my way through the maze of tables, dodging a waitress with her tray of cheap off-brand beer and watered-down cocktails. When I reached the bar I dropped myself onto the stool and held up a five. Quick as a wink, the bill was gone and Jack was sliding a beer in front of me. I checked the label. Woodland Ale. Cute.
“Rory,” said Jack. My five disappeared into his vest. No change appeared. “What brings you out on such a cold winter’s night? Looking for something to warm your sheets?”
“Business doesn’t care about the weather, Jack.” I took a swig of my beer. It was decent enough. A little hoppy for my tastes, but I try never to look a gift horse—or a good beer—in the mouth. “My sheets don’t need warming, and even if they did, I wouldn’t be asking you back to my place. We have a strictly working relationship for a reason.”
“Because you know that if you ever gave in to my not inconsiderable charms, you’d never be able to let me go,” said Jack, with a smirk.
“That, or I’d shoot you in the back of the head for trying to lift my wallet.” I took another drink before setting the bottle aside. Business had to come before pleasure, always. “Does the name ‘Clodagh Holly’ mean anything to you?”
“Current Winter Queen,” said Jack, without missing a beat. “Word on the street is she doesn’t have any challengers for her throne right now. She’s likely to die with first thaw and then resurrect come autumn, be a two-termer. She inherited the old-fashioned way.”
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